Genii Weblog

One of the tentative products that I have been developing under the umbrella name of OpenSesame is the ability to edit a view in a spreadsheet. Actually, you are not editing the view, but rather the documents in the view. It is a bit like "in view editing" on steroids. You choose the action "Edit view in spreadsheet" and go from this Notes view:

to this spreadsheet (I am using OpenOffice.org Cal for this screenshot, but it works equally well in the new Notes 8 beta Spreadsheets productivity app):

Then, you make whatever changes you like, using whatever macros or tools or tricks you like to use in a spreadsheet, and save. Back in the Notes view, you pick "Update view from spreadsheet", and voila! the documents are updated.

So, as cool as all that is, it doesn't quite explain the title of this post. You see, the sample I started with had 377 documents, but when I went to time how long that took, it was too fast to time with the rough notes timer. So I added a bunch more documents. A whole frigging bunch. I stopped when I got to 50,000 documents. While it is certainly possible that people would want to edit a view with more than 50,000 documents, this seemed like a good first test at scalability, given that I had not tested over 377 before this.

You guessed it. I gave away the punchline in the title. Six seconds to generate a spreadsheet with 50,000 rows representing the view. It took nine seconds to open in OpenOffice.org Calc. So, in 15 seconds, the user would be in editing even a really, really big view. I'll have to switch over to my beta machine and test with Notes 8, but that has mostly been faster that OpenOffice.org. Just to give a bit of perspective, the trial.ods is 208,862 bytes, but the expanded XML file is 39,301,284 (you could say it zips well).